How to decide what to work on

There is always too much to do. The list of things to do never gets shorter, it only gets longer. So how do you determine which of those things on the list should be worked on?

One heuristic for making this decision as outlined in the book :

“…make clear and consistent decision about where given work tasks fall on the shallow-to-deep scale. To do so, it asks that you evaluate activities by asking a simple (but surprisingly illuminating) question:

“How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?”

Here’s what I worked on last week and an estimate of the number of months it would take to train somebody else to do it:

Filming videos to present new parts of Hub - 6 months - it would be a good idea to go through Toastmasters, learn the product, frame the video, briefly but thoroughly explain the video, edit the video, post the video, get the video approved by other stakeholders, a million little details

Coding a way to show help videos to people within Hub Coding a change to pipeline views - 12 months - Learn how to code, learn how to build a quality customer-facing product, determine how the content will be updated and by whom, get the code approved, into production, and the resources trained to be able to do the content work

QA review for new functionality - 1 month - Learn how to set up the local environment, be exhaustive in testing features and make sure they work

Design assessment of new functionality - 18 months - Learn what good design means, be creative enough to think about new/different ways to do it, understand the current design system, understand how to influence people to do thing you want w/o walking on them.

1-on-1 meetings - 120 months - 10 years of leadership and knowledge and empathy, a senior position in the company, respect of your colleagues

Brainstorming and writing documentation for new products - 60 months - Some of the same design assessment skills, ability to write a clear yet concise document, vision for the future of the product, understanding of how it fits into the product, what other features could enhance, rely upon, conflict with this feature, ability to work with (or convince) senior leadership of this particular way forward, ability to communicate with designers, developers, stakeholders.

In this particular scenario, it is clear where my time should be spent.